The fatal calling card of Mexico’s fancy lady

Even the most mundane parts of Mexico offer their own carnivals of horror. I was lucky enough in 1986 to live in the sleepy southern town of Tehuacan, which is about the same size as Dubbo, and have returned a few times since.

In 1991 a freight train ploughed through one of Tehuacan’s busiest railway crossings into a row of buses, trucks and cars, killing more than 60 people, many of them schoolchildren.

Authorities said the train’s brakes had failed. Witnesses reported that when it careered into town there wasn’t a single person on board, that the crew had jumped for their lives.

In Tehuacan, people tell two stories about the train - that there wasn’t anybody on the train, ever, and that if you go to the railway crossing today before dawn there is a group of schoolchildren standing on the tracks who disappear as the sun rises.

They probably don’t believe the stories but they tell them anyway, usually late at night when you’re half cut on tequila and are about to walk home in the dark.

In the past few days I have spoken to mates in Mexico and been reading Mexican news sites such as the conservative national broadsheet El Excelsior and the leftist tabloid La Jornada. As would be the case in any nation, discussion about swine flu is panicked to the point of hysterical, but also tinged with the darkness and conspiracy peculiar to Mexico.

In a piece headed “Ending the rumours”, Excelsior columnist Denise Maerker quotes an email circulating throughout Mexico claiming swine flu is the invention of students at the University of Ohio dedicated to the creation of transgenic viruses.

Showing the Mexicans’ understandable distrust of their habitually crooked politicians, another email claims the vaccines being stockpiled for the population are placebos and that the only effective vaccine is a Canadian one quarantined for the President and his family.

There are rumours that hundreds of corpses are being kept secretly at undisclosed facilities. Then there’s the stuff that might be true.

Overnight on Monday, some of the Mexican news sites started publishing stories about the small town of Perote, not far from where I used to live - a dusty, nondescript place known only for its local delicacy, honey bread.

The stories relate to a five-year-old girl who has contracted swine flu, and may have been the first to do so.

There is speculation in Perote, which the US media is starting to pick up on, that this girl may have become sick as a result of living near an enormous local piggery co-owned by a massive US-owned agribusiness, Smithfield Foods.

For several months now, residents of Perote and the neighbouring township of La Gloria, the site of the piggery, have complained of respiratory illnesses, which they believe are caused by excrement-laden dust in the air.

Also, many residents of Perote and La Gloria live in such extreme poverty that they keep their own pigs and chickens in a common area, in or near the same water supply they use for washing clothes, bathing and preparing meals.

El Excelsior has posted a video on life in the township. It’s in Spanish, but the pictures tell the story. You can almost see the Fancy Lady herself.

Now that the five-year-old girl has been diagnosed with swine flu, it has also emerged that two children died in Perote in February and March under mysterious circumstances. Their bodies are being exhumed for testing.

One US journalist who has picked up on the story is Huffington Post blogger David Kirby, who fairly notes that the company that co-owns the piggery has rejected any responsibility for the outbreak. Kirby writes:

“Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of US hog giant Smithfield Foods, issued its own statement saying there was no sign of swine flu at any of its operations . . . El Universal newspaper said the company reported no signs of disease in any of its 907 workers, or in its 60,000 breeding sows or 500,000 feeder pigs, all of whom were vaccinated against swine flu.”

Kirby goes on to make the following valid point: “The industry statement that this disease was not transmitted from pigs to people contradicts virtually all Mexican government statements so far, including Mexico’s Health Minister, Jose Angel Cordova, who said the virus, ‘mutated from pigs, and then at some point was transmitted to humans’.”

It’s this gap in the argument that is the fascinating part of the swine flu story.

Dismissive claims from agribusiness that there’s no evidence of the virus shifting from pigs to humans are not backed up by the science.

In a neat explanation on ABC’s Radio National yesterday, science correspondent Chris Smith explained: “A pig could have had a form of flu and if a pig worker infects that pig with a form of human flu, the pig can then be co-infected with two very similar viruses at the same time. You can get a hybrid where the worst bits of both viruses combine, producing a super-virus.”

Shorn of its magical realist atmospherics, its conspiracy emails, the story of swine flu may end up being simpler and more frightening: A story of globalisation and poverty, where frontier capital has been attracted to an impoverished country by lax health regulations and cheap labour, with the results now being played out in the world’s hospital wards and cemeteries.

- This column was originally published in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph